New Directions: Bridging Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Survey Research at SurvAi-Day Workshop

The workshop aims to strengthen the emerging connection between NLP and survey researchers. Survey researchers and data collectors are increasingly recognizing the need to integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) into their workflows. At the same time, NLP researchers see the importance of grounding their models with better data for accurate public representation as technology is becoming increasingly human-facing. This event seeks to foster joint work between the survey research and NLP communities, identify gaps and needs, and initiate a closer relationship between these interconnected fields.

October 7, 2024

8:00 am - 5:00 pm

Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center, Orem Alumni Hall

7801 Alumni Drive, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742

Program Fees include all-day access to the workshop, one short course, continental breakfast, and lunch.

Registration Fee: $200

Student Registration Fee: $100

AGENDA

8:00 am Continental Breakfast

9:00 am Short Courses

1. Computer Assisted Qualitative Content Analysis (Philip Resnik)
2. Automated Comment Categorization using Naive Bayes and Python (Tyler Waite)
3. Collecting High Quality Training Data: Lessons from 20 years in Surveys (Stephanie Eckman)
4. Tutorial: How to Query LLMs / Pitfalls in Prompting / Caution in Prompting (Xingpeng Wang and Philip Mondorf)
5. Fine Tuning LLMs for Data Augmentation and Synthesis (Tobias Holtdirk and Caro Haensch)

10:30 am Breakout Sessions

1. How can LLMs be used for survey operations? (Claire Kelley and Quirin Wünschinger)
2. Synthetic respondents / data / values / opinion / attitudes embedded in the LLMs (Yongwei Yang)
3. Pathways for Advancing Survey Research with LLMs / How survey research might help build next gen LLMs (Trent Buskirk)
4. Using ML learning to improve analysis of open ended questions / How we analyze answers we got (Bolai Ma and Sarah Kelley)
5. What LLMs cannot do (Josh Lerner)
6. Using Chatbots as Interviewers (Max Lang)

12:00 pm Lunch

1:00 pm Welcome Messages and Keynote Speakers

2:30 pm. Panel Discussion followed by Q&A

3:00 pm Break with refreshments

3:30 pm Panel Discussion followed by Q&A

4:30 pm. Closing remarks - Where from here?

5:00 pm. Workshop ends